


Patrons and Saints

by norgbelulah



Category: What Maisie Knew
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:26:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't talk about names until Margo is six months pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patrons and Saints

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riverlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/gifts).



Shortly after Margo came to stay with Susanna and Beale, to take care of Maisie, she asked about the little girl's name. 

"Oh, it's Beale's grandmother's name. Scottish, I guess, huh?" Susanna said. "You would know.” Margo nodded and Susanna went on. “We never talked about a name before she popped out, three weeks early, too. I was so tired and all strung out after, and they were asking about a name for the birth certificate. I guess that was the first thing he thought of. I would have named her something crazy, given half a chance, like Gwyneth and Chris' children. So I suppose it's all for the better. It suits her, right?"

Margo agreed.

What she didn't tell Susanna then, and only later, with a rising buzz, revealed to Lincoln as Maisie fell asleep between them in the booth in the hotel bar, was that Maisie, _Mairead_ rather, was the name of a beloved aunt who had died when Margo was a teenager. She was the woman who Margo was named for.

Mairead. Margaret. Margo. Maise. They were all the same name.

"If I ever had a daughter," she said, smiling at him, "I wanted to name her Maisie."

"But she is your daughter," he'd replied with his uncertain smile. “That’s really great.”

When he said he was sorry like he really understood, Margo knew she liked him. He wasn’t what she thought he was. And Maisie loved him.

When he said that, with no qualifier, no extra words like “step” or “new” or “sort of,” she knew she could love him too. It wouldn’t be difficult at all.

 

They don't talk about names until Margo is six months pregnant.

"Margaret is the patron saint of pregnancy," she says one morning from bed, her hands across her belly.

Lincoln’s parents are Swedish immigrants and all his family are Lutheran. They don’t know anything about saints.

“Oh yeah?” he said, putting on his whites. He is a sous chef now, at the four star restaurant on the pier.

Susanna bought them the house after her tour sold out and the single off her new album made a respectable run on the charts. She was riding high, making deals to put it in car commercials and a million other things people wanted her smoky voice to sell. She outbid a nice older couple from Westchester, looking for a summer home, and she cackled about it when she told them, all of them, on speaker phone.

She said the house was Maisie’s and that they could stay if she was staying. If Maisie wants to be in the city, they have to figure something else out.

It’s good for them, Maisie doesn’t want to be anywhere else. 

She started school, public school--Susanna had a grand time telling them how shocked Beale had been about that, assuring them both that _she_ was the product of the American public school system and had turned out just fine, thank you--in the fall. Maisie was thriving.

Lincoln is still married to Susanna. It’s easier that way for guardianship. Neither of them want to broach the subject of raising Susanna’s daughter if neither of them have any legal right to do so. Everyone knows, yet no one has exactly said, what a nightmare of courts and lawyers and contracts that would be.

Margo filed her divorce papers the week she moved from Beale’s apartment, the one for which she’d never been on the lease. She signed them six months ago. She thinks that might have been the night they made the baby.

“Yes,” she tells him. Maisie had already caught the bus to school. Since Lincoln usually starts work in the late morning, they have this time to talk about things. “She was swallowed by a dragon, but he spit her out because she carried the cross. They put her to death. Oh, and she spoke to Joan of Arc.”

“That’s cool,” he says. “What did she say?”

“To the dragon?”

“To Joan.” He smiles, turning to her from the closet.

“To drive out the English and crown the King, of course,” she answers. Lincoln was shite at history, but she was pretty sure he would know the story of Joan of Arc.

“Oh yeah,” he says. He climbs on the bed next to her, pressing his head against her belly, listening for any kicking. 

“There’s also a Saint Margaret of Scotland,” Margo goes on. “She was a Queen.”

He casts his pretty blue eyes up at her. His mouth quirks. “You really want another ‘M’ name flying around this house?” Maisie had been dead set on naming the turtle Maurice.

Margo grins at him. Like Maisie, he could be surprisingly perceptive. While she hid her insights behind quiet smiles and her mother’s dark eyes, he hid his behind dopy grins and the bit of hair that’s always falling into his eyes.

“I was thinking,” she smiles shyly, “Greta, for a girl.”

“I like it,” he says immediately. He presses his lips to her belly. “What about for a boy?”

They’d decided not to test the sex.

She lays back on her pillow and draws her fingers into his hair. It’s still damp from the shower. “We could name him after another U.S. President. Clinton?” She giggles.

He makes a face. “Only people desperate to be American do that. You want him to be that apple pie?”

She tilts her head, looking down at him. Maisie has dual citizenship. Maybe she won’t always want to live on this side of the pond. The thinks how strange it is to plan your life around the desires of a seven-year-old, whose blood you don’t share. She wouldn’t trade it for anything, not now.

“I suppose it should be something more cosmopolitan,” she muses.

“You mean like Greta?” he jokes.

She huffs, always sensitive these days. “Well, if you don’t like it--”

“No, no, I do.” He holds her still when she tries to squirm away, miffed. “I like the way you say it,” he says. “Maisie will call her Gretel, for sure. That’ll be awesome.” He gazes steadily at her. “I mean it, Margo.”

She stills and smiles again, letting him kiss her until he has to leave. 

 

Margo works from home for an educational non-profit. It’s a good use for the Master’s degree she acquired from Columbia to be a nanny to the rich and famous. It’s convenient that she doesn’t have to leave the house much as the baby begins to make everything else that much more inconvenient. 

When Maisie hops off the bus from school in the afternoon, she puts everything away and they make dinner together.

Maisie spies a baby name book underneath the things Margo cleared from the kitchen table.

“How can you name the baby if you don’t know it will be a boy or girl?” she asks, pushing her hair away from her face.

They told her about the baby months ago. She was beyond excited, and forever thinking about what they baby might do, or like, or be. She never once worried about how a baby would change things for the bad, only for the good. She wanted to share her room, which was wonderful, because Margo and Lincoln figured she would need to eventually. The house just wasn't that big.

Margo smiles. “Well, you can choose two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. Then give the baby one of those names once he or she is born. Or, you can choose a name that can be for a boy or a girl. Like your friend Morgan at school.”

“He’s a boy though,” Maisie protests. 

“Yes, but Morgan can be a girl’s name too. A good girlfriend of mine from school’s name was Morgan. She had the prettiest red hair.” 

Maisie smiles. “Should we name the baby Morgan?”

Margo wonders about her affinity for ‘M’ names. “Maybe,” she says. “Lincoln and I are thinking about it.”

“Can I help?” she asks leaning forward across the counter.

Margo begins to cut up an onion for the soup she’s decided to make. “Well, I don’t see why not. Why don’t you think about it, and make us a list? Do you think you can write all the names you might like down?”

Maisie nods. She’s very good at her letters. She frowns and asks, “Can I ask spelling questions?”

“Of course.”

Three nights later Maisie presents them both with a sheet of her personal stationery--from a pad her mother ordered for her birthday, so that they could write letters, she said. “From the desk of Maisie Elizabeth Beale,” was written at the top, formed out of lines of blooming flowers, and the dots on the eyes were tiny butterflies.

There were two columns on the paper, with names written in pink and blue crayon in Maisie’s precise, but still very child-like hand.

“I called Mommy to ask how to spell some,” she says, “because I wanted to surprise you. She says this one,” she points to the name “Goldie,” in the middle of the four-name list for girls, “would be perfect.” She beams.

Margo has a hard time keeping her face straight and Lincoln’s eyebrows have shot up dramatically. “Yeah,” he says, and Margo can’t tell if he’s just humoring her or not. “That one’s really nice.”

They look at the lists. At the top of the boy’s list is “Alligator.”

“Did your mommy tell you how to spell that one too?” Margo asks.

“Uh huh. She said it was okay,” she twists her mouth to the side, remembering and then reciting, “and no crazier than Apple.”

Margo laughs. “I guess not.” 

Lincoln pulls Maisie between them and they go through all the names on the list together, talking about their pros and cons, and why Maisie chose them. 

At the bottom of the boys’ list, in blue ink, as if it were an afterthought, she’s written, “George.”

“You mean, like, Saint George?” Lincoln asks with a quirk to his lips. 

“What’s a saint?” Maisie looks up between them curiously.

Margo asks quickly, “Why did you pick that one, sweetie?”

“It’s the fisherman’s name,” she says, her tiny voice ringing like a bell. 

“Oh, that's right,” Lincoln muses, his big hand running through Maisie’s tangled hair.

“I asked him how to spell it instead of Mommy. He let me use the blue pen he keeps on his clipboard.” She’s beaming at the memory.

“That’s what you wanted to ask him yesterday?” Margo had thought it was funny Maisie wouldn’t say when she asked.

“Uh huh.”

Lincoln casts his eyes over to her slyly, the quirk in his lips a full blown smile now. “Another dragon slayer,” he says.

Margo grins and says to Maisie. “That’s a good one. We’ll think on it though, okay?”

 

In bed that night, Lincoln spoons up next to her and mumbles, “Won’t it be weird we name the baby after the local fisherman?”

Margo shrugs, dropping her hands to cradle her belly. “I think it’s sweet. And anyway, I have a feeling we’ve got a girl on our hands regardless.”

 

Four months later, they name her Greta.


End file.
